Touch 25 liner notes.. something I found amusing and true...
Gwen came back from her house in Annapolis with a box of mine that I had left for her to hold onto. Inside there were various papers, books, and CDs, one of which was the Touch 25 compilation, celebrating the 25 years of existence of Touch Music, label to Biosphere, Fennesz, BJ Nilsen .. the whole avant garde kit and kaboodle. I bought the CD when it first came out over a year ago but never absorbed it the way it should be absorbed until tonight.
I just want to share with you the liner notes, I know they are copyright protected blah blah ... but we're friends here and I know you won't tell. I just wanted to post something beautiful in my life to share so here I go:
Touch 25
Over the 25 years of Touch releases the music has moved from the tactile dimensions of vinyl and tape to an immaterial future in the digital format. Whether, in the long run, music will "lose his masters voice" finally and achieve a state of post-functional freedom is a moot point. In an afterward to "the recording angel", Eisenberg writes that the warmth of the vinyl format is "not quite recaptured on CD, any more than the warmth of a blazing hearth can be matched by central heating". This is one aspect broadly accepted now, concerning the conditions determined by digital sound, and yet the downward spiral continues.
The industry has been exposed by the heated challenges to its control over manufacturing and distribution. Turning to the new revenues of telematics, computer games and downloads, music becomes the ID-card to new practices pursued by business, and an adventure playground for the consumer collector.
For a lot of people, the ability to download mp3s, locate live torrents on Dime, blogsite, podcast and self-cast onto an iPod desert island, is a wonderful thing. The audience seems to be in control, probably in a honeymoon period that masks the deeper questions of infinite hard-disks, brain damage and Chinese firewalls. Can the amount of data coming online possibly keep up with the amount of storage available- what will happen? Will data be selectively removed... History about to be unwritten? What will your brain feel like when it has disappeared?
Please consider this collection of new music, this romantic journey, and antithesis of dustbin, to be firmly linked to a narrative that is neither nostalgic nor processed to a temporary screen value. Hopefully an enduring attempt towards building a more progressive relationship to the activity of listening and the idea of 'awesome'. It has a reference to sound sculpture, moving image and short stories that tell of trying to piece it all together. Though "interdisciplinary" ideas have a lot to answer for.
Someone with a reputation for self-seclusion, the sculptor Anthony Caro, was once asked whether he considered himself an independent artist. "What", he replied, "independent of my breakfast?"
In the war years, Frank Sinatra was an up and coming singer whose career was finely cast by forces more bent on payola than the singular item. He made money for the whole set-up and various things were looked after. In 60 years nothing has changed, except the rules of engagement now favour the non-musical like never before. Frank once said, "I'm not a singer, I'm a microphone artist." Most of all he hated performing "My Way".
-Jon Wozencroft
http://www.touchmusic.org.uk
I just want to share with you the liner notes, I know they are copyright protected blah blah ... but we're friends here and I know you won't tell. I just wanted to post something beautiful in my life to share so here I go:
Touch 25
Over the 25 years of Touch releases the music has moved from the tactile dimensions of vinyl and tape to an immaterial future in the digital format. Whether, in the long run, music will "lose his masters voice" finally and achieve a state of post-functional freedom is a moot point. In an afterward to "the recording angel", Eisenberg writes that the warmth of the vinyl format is "not quite recaptured on CD, any more than the warmth of a blazing hearth can be matched by central heating". This is one aspect broadly accepted now, concerning the conditions determined by digital sound, and yet the downward spiral continues.
The industry has been exposed by the heated challenges to its control over manufacturing and distribution. Turning to the new revenues of telematics, computer games and downloads, music becomes the ID-card to new practices pursued by business, and an adventure playground for the consumer collector.
For a lot of people, the ability to download mp3s, locate live torrents on Dime, blogsite, podcast and self-cast onto an iPod desert island, is a wonderful thing. The audience seems to be in control, probably in a honeymoon period that masks the deeper questions of infinite hard-disks, brain damage and Chinese firewalls. Can the amount of data coming online possibly keep up with the amount of storage available- what will happen? Will data be selectively removed... History about to be unwritten? What will your brain feel like when it has disappeared?
Please consider this collection of new music, this romantic journey, and antithesis of dustbin, to be firmly linked to a narrative that is neither nostalgic nor processed to a temporary screen value. Hopefully an enduring attempt towards building a more progressive relationship to the activity of listening and the idea of 'awesome'. It has a reference to sound sculpture, moving image and short stories that tell of trying to piece it all together. Though "interdisciplinary" ideas have a lot to answer for.
Someone with a reputation for self-seclusion, the sculptor Anthony Caro, was once asked whether he considered himself an independent artist. "What", he replied, "independent of my breakfast?"
In the war years, Frank Sinatra was an up and coming singer whose career was finely cast by forces more bent on payola than the singular item. He made money for the whole set-up and various things were looked after. In 60 years nothing has changed, except the rules of engagement now favour the non-musical like never before. Frank once said, "I'm not a singer, I'm a microphone artist." Most of all he hated performing "My Way".
-Jon Wozencroft
http://www.touchmusic.org.uk